My DS started a new school recently as we moved to the U.K. into year 8 from overseas. He has been doing generally ok, getting on great with the classes and is slowly making some friends, although taking a while to find “his people” (but it’s only been 3 weeks).
He’s mainly ok but on Mondays he has two hours of two different sports. His complaints are; he hates getting changed as everyone is squashed in and it’s overwhelming and noisy. He also doesn’t like the second hour of sport as it’s dance which firstly he just doesn’t like, but he’s also in a group with boys who “mess around and take the piss” - DS is a rule follower and reading between the lines, the boys are ok but just not taking it seriously and are having a laugh. Probably fine normally but when he doesn’t know them well and is a bit of a quiet nerd himself, he’s finding this really hard to deal with.
I’ve told him basically that the changing thing he just has to get on with, the dance thing, it’s two more weeks, we all have to do things we don’t like sometimes and while I sympathise as I would find it annoying too, there’s not much he can do about other people.
First thing this morning he was talking about it and how he was dreading Monday and how he has no friends etc (I think this is an exaggeration as the only day he mentions this is before Monday)
Any suggestions of how I can help him deal with things he just doesn’t enjoy and help him be more resilient to things he doesn’t want to do, but has to do? We had this before about camp at his old school, he was stressing about it for weeks, tried negotiating his way out of it etc and then honestly, didn’t love it, but he did go and it was basically fine.
I need strategies to help him understand that life isn’t all sunshine and fun basically!